"Yegorov may be one of the more interesting of the Soviet artists to be seen in London to date".Keith Patrick - ARTLINE Magazine, London, 1990

Yegorov (born in 1926) is one of the most remarkable artists of the 'Odessa School of Art'. In 1946 he was accepted into the 4th grade of the Odessa College of Fine Art where he studied under T.B. Fraierman. He then studied at Repin's and Mukhina's Art Institute in St. Petersburg.

He is well represented in museums and private collections throughout the former USSR and internationally.

The Black Sea is transformed into the mercurial opalescence of a nacreous globe, turning away into the late afternoon shimmer of a setting sun. The sea is as much a character in the work of Yuri Yegorov as the caryatid-like women and simple fishing boats; calm and sparkling like a shower of pearls, or vigorous and turbulent, riffled by waves, it functions as an archetypal glyph for the force of nature. The women in Yegorov's paintings also fulfil a symbolic or mythic function, their solidity and stature alluding to the ancient stone statues found in the countryside of the Ukraine, figures which embody the presence of the mother goddess of pre-Christian religions, a goddess of the earth and the seasons, denoting the cycles of birth, death and regeneration.

There may be superficial resemblances in Yegorov's work to the early Blue, Rose and neo-Classical periods of Picasso's oeuvre - with his stout women and classicised poses - but a much closer resonance is found in the work of Balthus. In particular Yegorov's interiors with a single standing figure have a great affinity with many of Balthus' similar compositions such as The Moth of 1959 and Nude in Profile of 1977. Both share the same frieze-like patterning of space and simplified forms, but whereas Balthus' nudes smoulder with a pungent and dangerous eroticism, Yegorov's women achieve a balanced and serene poise, the often elongated figures reminding one of the stately Virgins of El Greco. The model may have been his wife or daughter but theses figures stand for all women, they are not so much portraits as portrayals of the essence of the feminine.

A prominent member of the Odessa Group, Yegorov's work is well known and collected throughout the former USSR and in Europe and America. He first showed in London ten years ago at the Red Square Gallery where his work received an enthusiastic response. Now in his seventies Yegorov has demonstrated that there is no weakening of his command of his chosen medium. The work in this exhibition demonstrates his continuing mastery of the fundamental elements of painting: space, light, colour, structure, symbol and surface. There is a new clarity and simplicity in the recent work, a coherent rendering of the lucid light of his native Odessa. Subtle greys and muted blues and browns are played off against vibrant primary hues and succulent oranges and greens. In the still-lifes the repeated appearance of the six-sided conic object and the abstracted spheres of the fruit remind us of Cezanne's dictum about reducing all forms to the cylinder, the cone, the sphere and the cube.

The pictorial space is flattened in the still-lifes by tipping the surface of the table towards the viewer, the same mechanism we find at work in the paintings of Braque and Picasso during the late cubist period. In the sea-scapes the same flattening of space is achieved by placing the horizon at the very top of the picture, this has the effect of privileging the surface of the painting over any evocation of illusionistic space. This modernist concern is further reinforced by the tactile application of the paint in a thick and sensual impasto, drawing attention to the surface. It is the pictorial space rather than the depicted space which is important to the artist, and it is these concerns which place Yegorov's oeuvre firmly in a modernist tradition stretching from impressionism and cubism to contemporary artists such as David Hockney and Lucian Freud.

Yet, in their enforced isolation, Soviet artists of note have retained a sense of identity that the internationalism of the West has lost. That sense of regionalism and the identification of the artist with immediate, cultural concerns, is what at best distinguishes contemporary Soviet art from its Western counterpart. Admittedly, most Soviet artists appear unable to translate that feeling into an adequate visual language, perhaps, through no fault of their own, because access to the rich development of 20th Century art has been denied. But even so, occasionally an artist emerges that appears to have that coherent individual voice. Yuri Yegorov may be one such artist.

Yegorov is now 64 and, despite being a member of the Union of Artists since 1957, has retained an individual identity that is matched with the sound understanding of his craft. Because of this, Yegorov's career has not been rewarded with the accolades which his own country reserves for artists who have towed the Party line. But for a Western audience, it is difficult to see why Yegorov's art should not be acceptable to the most conservative of censors. Formally, his work derives from the vague area between Renoir's more voluptuous nudes and Picasso's Blue or Rose Period, with perhaps an occasional nod in the direction of the neo-Classical nudes which Picasso painted in the '20s. The most powerful works are certainly the paintings of female figures, often solitary, maternal and monolithic, with the expanse of the Black Sea serving as a back-drop. These work best when the subject is least explicit, when peripheral detail is reduced to a minimum, and it is at such moments that we glimpse that Yegorov's painting has the potential to reach toward particular cultural references. On the most general level, there is something too earthy and too heavy thighed about the physiognomy of these women to fit comfortably into our own culture. These nudes are not sex symbols so much as maternal figures. More explicitly, they owe something to the 'Babas', the ancient figures which are to be found in the countryside of Yegorov's native Odessa. Stripped of the model's identity, they surface as powerful archetypes, born of a culture which appears closer to the earth than our own.

Although only a part of the artist's output, these female figures have a lasting impression, a resonance which suggests that Yegorov may be one of the more interesting of the Soviet artists to be seen in London to date.

"Yegorov may be one of the more interesting of the Soviet artists to be seen in London to date".Keith Patrick - ARTLINE Magazine, London, 1990

Yegorov (born in 1926) is one of the most remarkable artists of the 'Odessa School of Art'. In 1946 he was accepted into the 4th grade of the Odessa College of Fine Art where he studied under T.B. Fraierman. He then studied at Repin's and Mukhina's Art Institute in St. Petersburg.

He is well represented in museums and private collections throughout the former USSR and internationally.

The Black Sea is transformed into the mercurial opalescence of a nacreous globe, turning away into the late afternoon shimmer of a setting sun. The sea is as much a character in the work of Yuri Yegorov as the caryatid-like women and simple fishing boats; calm and sparkling like a shower of pearls, or vigorous and turbulent, riffled by waves, it functions as an archetypal glyph for the force of nature. The women in Yegorov's paintings also fulfil a symbolic or mythic function, their solidity and stature alluding to the ancient stone statues found in the countryside of the Ukraine, figures which embody the presence of the mother goddess of pre-Christian religions, a goddess of the earth and the seasons, denoting the cycles of birth, death and regeneration.

There may be superficial resemblances in Yegorov's work to the early Blue, Rose and neo-Classical periods of Picasso's oeuvre - with his stout women and classicised poses - but a much closer resonance is found in the work of Balthus. In particular Yegorov's interiors with a single standing figure have a great affinity with many of Balthus' similar compositions such as The Moth of 1959 and Nude in Profile of 1977. Both share the same frieze-like patterning of space and simplified forms, but whereas Balthus' nudes smoulder with a pungent and dangerous eroticism, Yegorov's women achieve a balanced and serene poise, the often elongated figures reminding one of the stately Virgins of El Greco. The model may have been his wife or daughter but theses figures stand for all women, they are not so much portraits as portrayals of the essence of the feminine.

A prominent member of the Odessa Group, Yegorov's work is well known and collected throughout the former USSR and in Europe and America. He first showed in London ten years ago at the Red Square Gallery where his work received an enthusiastic response. Now in his seventies Yegorov has demonstrated that there is no weakening of his command of his chosen medium. The work in this exhibition demonstrates his continuing mastery of the fundamental elements of painting: space, light, colour, structure, symbol and surface. There is a new clarity and simplicity in the recent work, a coherent rendering of the lucid light of his native Odessa. Subtle greys and muted blues and browns are played off against vibrant primary hues and succulent oranges and greens. In the still-lifes the repeated appearance of the six-sided conic object and the abstracted spheres of the fruit remind us of Cezanne's dictum about reducing all forms to the cylinder, the cone, the sphere and the cube.

The pictorial space is flattened in the still-lifes by tipping the surface of the table towards the viewer, the same mechanism we find at work in the paintings of Braque and Picasso during the late cubist period. In the sea-scapes the same flattening of space is achieved by placing the horizon at the very top of the picture, this has the effect of privileging the surface of the painting over any evocation of illusionistic space. This modernist concern is further reinforced by the tactile application of the paint in a thick and sensual impasto, drawing attention to the surface. It is the pictorial space rather than the depicted space which is important to the artist, and it is these concerns which place Yegorov's oeuvre firmly in a modernist tradition stretching from impressionism and cubism to contemporary artists such as David Hockney and Lucian Freud.

Yet, in their enforced isolation, Soviet artists of note have retained a sense of identity that the internationalism of the West has lost. That sense of regionalism and the identification of the artist with immediate, cultural concerns, is what at best distinguishes contemporary Soviet art from its Western counterpart. Admittedly, most Soviet artists appear unable to translate that feeling into an adequate visual language, perhaps, through no fault of their own, because access to the rich development of 20th Century art has been denied. But even so, occasionally an artist emerges that appears to have that coherent individual voice. Yuri Yegorov may be one such artist.

Yegorov is now 64 and, despite being a member of the Union of Artists since 1957, has retained an individual identity that is matched with the sound understanding of his craft. Because of this, Yegorov's career has not been rewarded with the accolades which his own country reserves for artists who have towed the Party line. But for a Western audience, it is difficult to see why Yegorov's art should not be acceptable to the most conservative of censors. Formally, his work derives from the vague area between Renoir's more voluptuous nudes and Picasso's Blue or Rose Period, with perhaps an occasional nod in the direction of the neo-Classical nudes which Picasso painted in the '20s. The most powerful works are certainly the paintings of female figures, often solitary, maternal and monolithic, with the expanse of the Black Sea serving as a back-drop. These work best when the subject is least explicit, when peripheral detail is reduced to a minimum, and it is at such moments that we glimpse that Yegorov's painting has the potential to reach toward particular cultural references. On the most general level, there is something too earthy and too heavy thighed about the physiognomy of these women to fit comfortably into our own culture. These nudes are not sex symbols so much as maternal figures. More explicitly, they owe something to the 'Babas', the ancient figures which are to be found in the countryside of Yegorov's native Odessa. Stripped of the model's identity, they surface as powerful archetypes, born of a culture which appears closer to the earth than our own.

Although only a part of the artist's output, these female figures have a lasting impression, a resonance which suggests that Yegorov may be one of the more interesting of the Soviet artists to be seen in London to date.